Thunder in the Deep
It is a story about a brave hero who try finding treasures of the deserted pyramid. There are mazes and puzzles, fire and water, different enemies and bonuses in the game.
The full version (v1.10) of the game contains following new features:
- installer which allows to install the game in any disk directory
- music in the main menu (you can add your favorite music too)
- tuning of background color (256 colors)
- each 5th level has a password for quick start of the game from your last game position
- the second sprites set which was used for design of most deep rooms of the pyramid
- quick levels with limited time of play
- bonuses and helpful things
- secret levels
Many tried to find ancient pyramids with countless treasures. But only one can get it...
The game is packed into a single file and decompressing is performed while loading. In depacked form the game occupies more than 3MB.
For the first time the tiling capabilities of Sprinter graphics mode is used. Tile is a 8x8 pixels square portion of the screen what can be repeated in any part of screen by duplication of its index. Game is working in graphical mode 320x256 and uses 256 colors. The maximum game map size can be up to 64x64 elements (it could be not only a square) 24x24 pixels each.
A lot of animated graphics sequencies was created for the game. Animated sprites of the hero and enemies are mixed with background using an accelerator. The number of actually available elements of backroung is higher what can be loaded in video ram at once, because the elements are reloading in realtime. The combined sprites are used for the hero (a bag for the diamonds is a separate sprite).
There are smooth 1-pixel scrolling with use of Game Configuration. The game includes a special version of firmware (which define hardware features) for loading to the Altera PLD. All changes of firmware are temporary. Previous firmware will be restored after the game finishing. The engine is capable of filling the whole game area with with animated and moving objects (diamonds, stones, water).
To increase a speed of the program, all time-consumption tasks are performed from 16k of Fast-RAM.
The Program required a Sprinter computer with:
- Sp2000 (Sp2000-Light) mainboard
- CPU Zilog Z84C1516, FPGA Altera ACEX EP1K30
- BIOS 3.xx
- Estex DSS v1.54-1.6x
- 3.1 MB memory
- 1.5 MB of hard disk